Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter . Ordered to let journalists back in, the Pentagon instead banished them to an annex on the far side of its parking lot. A Pentagon reporter called that “an elaborate troll.” Another told me it was “a bullshit move.” “How weird is that?” Paul Friedman, a United States District judge, remarked at a hearing on Monday. “Is it Catch-22 ? Is it Kafka?” Kevin Baron—the founding executive editor of Defense One , who spent fifteen years covering the Pentagon—said the Defense Department is playing games: “Across the administration, they are purposely breaking rules and doing what they want, for as long as they can,” he told me. “This is the definition of asking for forgiveness later, except they’re not even asking for forgiveness. If they wanted to comply, they would have done exactly what the judge said the first time.” Making this move while the United States is at war, Baron said, is especially problematic.…